Here's a gift link to her latest in TFN. She takes as her departure point Tucker Carlson's recent two hour podcast featuring Darryl Cooper, a fan of Adolf Hitler.
Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.
Some right wingers were nonplussed by Carlson's embrace of Nazism -- although apparently not JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr., who are both scheduled to appear on his show soon. However, as Goldberg goes on to argue, holocaust denial and other alternative histories are the inevitable result of what has become standard denialism on the right of historical consensus and even fundamental consensual reality.
Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense.
Candace Owens, another anti-woke right-wing celebrity who has lately become Hitler-curious, has also come to question received wisdom about the shape of the earth. “I’m not a flat-earther,” she said in July. “I’m not a round-earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.”
This is what we are confronting, folks. This is for real.
2 comments:
There's so much we could talk about here. I think the main question to ask is: What motivates a human being like Darryl Cooper to say the shit that comes out of his mouth? It could be feelings of inferiority, and probably is, in addition to other things. He's not a scholar, he's not a researcher. He likes Hitler because he relates to him – – someone with a little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of craziness.
Most people on this planet do not know why they say and do the things that they do. Their behavior is largely and even completely compensatory for what they unconsciously feel they lack in their lives. Since they don't know what drives them, their energy is directed in any number of twisted directions. Cooper is one of those individuals. I like this definition of fanaticism: Doubling down on your strategy when you have completely lost sight of your aim.
Maybe these folks OD'ed on Postmodernism.
Post a Comment